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On 27th February 1900, 129 delegates met in a hall on Farringdon Street. They represented organisations from the Social Democratic Federation on the far Left to several Liberal MPs on the relative Right, with over 70 socialist societies and trade unions falling somewhere between. From that meeting the Labour Party grew, born of a spectrum…
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Labour regained control of Crawley Borough Council on a platform of homes, jobs and the community. I continue to believe that these areas should be our primary focus of attention, at a time when resources are limited it is vital that we focus on those things which stand to offer the greatest positive impact upon…
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Fracking for shale gas has been controversial since the first attempts to introduce it to the UK a decade ago. You may recall 2013 protests down the road in Balcombe, when plans to frack next to Ardingly Reservoir met considerable local opposition. Last week the Government warned that if councils didn’t process fracking applications more…
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Last month Crawley Borough Council voted to condemn David Cameron for breaking his pre-election commitments on tax credits, something which will have a huge impact upon the finances of thousands of working families here in Crawley, changes which Crawley’s Tories wanted it on the record that they support. Too often I’ve heard it said politicians…
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A little over a year ago, Labour regained control of Crawley Borough Council following eight years’ of increasingly chaotic Conservative administration. By the time of the election key policies such as the Local Plan had stalled, there was a blank sheet of paper where we needed a town centre regeneration strategy and the height of…
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Following the election, the Conservatives proposed various amendments to the Hunting Act which would make the ban on foxhunting impossible to administer. Last week they were forced to postpone that decision after it became clear they couldn’t win a vote in the House of Commons. Foxhunting is a divisive issue, not for the UK population—80%…
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Today George Osborne unveils his second Budget of 2015. Quite why the Chancellor has felt the need to issue an ‘Emergency Budget’ when he only wrote the last a couple of months ago is hard to explain without coming to the view that there were some things he’d rather the public didn’t know before the…
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Governments often get accused of fudging statistics. Having studied statistics, one of my regular complaints at the County Council is over the administration’s attempts to run the organisation—and increasingly hold to account companies they’ve outsourced to—through metrics which don’t really mean anything. With that in mind you could perhaps forgive David Cameron for deciding one…
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Within the next fortnight Sir Howard Davies is due to publish his report on airport capacity, putting forward his recommendation as to where the UK would gain the most benefit from a new runway. The debate around airport expansion has a long history and this is unlikely to be the end of it, for one…
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Shelter is a basic human need, yet across the UK we’re hundreds of thousands of properties short from ensuring everyone has decent living conditions. Too little is being done to get the houses built, too little is being done to address rip-off rents and too little is being done to reduce costs for first-time buyers.…
Peter Lamb for Crawley 